Monday, April 2, 2007

Live From Suzhou

Posted By on Mon, Apr 2, 2007 at 1:56 AM

Hey, kids. The blog is now in Southern China. We flew from Beijing to Shanghai this morning, before zipping on a bus to Suzhou. (Our tour guide explained that Suzhou is a small city, seeing as only 6 million people live here.) We then had a delightful lunch—well, all but two people in our group had a delightful lunch. It turns out that these two women are deathly allergic to shellfish, and when they told the servers this, the servers looked them like they were from Mars. Are any Chinese people allergic to shellfish? Anyway, our tour guide/translator assured the women there was nothing to worry about: Everything was OK to eat unless the servers said it wasn't.

The two women instead decided to take their chances at the restaurant next door: KFC.

After that, we went to the Lingering Garden, and then to the magnificent Tiger Hill pagoda. It actually has nothing to do with tigers; it's actually the tomb of some king. I would know more about Tiger Hill, except that the tour guide was telling us about Tiger Hill at the same time our bus driver was making a left turn into a stream of honking, oncoming traffic. My attention was then dedicated to watching my life pass before my eyes.

Tomorrow, we look at some stuff involving silk production, and then head to Hangzhou. That's assuming we survive the bus trip to and from dinner.